I'm using sprite and it seems they are being loaded the number of times they are used... which defeats the purpose of spriting at the first place. Why? I am using background: url() for the sprites.

Aren't browsers smart enough to know they're the same images? For example I use some 30+ blank images in element as placeholder for sprite later. That blank images gets loaded 30+ times the first time around. Is this expected?

What evidence do you have for the multiple retrieval? Are you actually monitoring the data stream with a packet filter, or just looking at the counter on the progress bar? Resources are "counted" even if they are being retrieved from the cache. — Richard Grevers over 8 years ago

Firebug NET panel. It records requests that return 200 status OK, not 304 NOT MODIFIED, on first time load (not from cache). — SyaZ over 8 years ago